Shanghai Shadows Read Online Free

his arm and said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
    We darted through the crowd, running back to the International Settlement. The Japanese guard’s eyes burned into my back all the way across the bridge.
    It didn’t take us long to figure out that the language of business wasn’t the one we spoke, or even Chinese. So Mother taught English to refugees and to us.
    â€œMother!” I wailed each time she plunked Erich and me down for an English lesson. Secretly I soaked up the foreign words. I longed to speak English—not the stuffy British English that some of the rich Jews in Shanghai spoke, but American English, full of delicious slang: Toot, toot, tootsie, good-bye; razz; nifty; rolled around on my tongue like a lemon drop.
    This was not the American English that Mother had learned. We were never encouraged to ask Mother about those years in America, or about her special friend, the one Erich and I nicknamed Molly O’Toole after the mysterious M.O. that appeared on the return address. Mother had been a university student in the state of California, we knew that much, and also that she hadn’t graduated. She’d returned to Vienna in 1923 to finish her studies, but then Father came along, and how could school possibly compete with true love?
    True love. Oh, yes, now into my twelves, how I yearned to be in love with someone. Someone other than myself.

CHAPTER THREE
    1940–1941
    â€œTanya, there’s that little thief I told you about!” Tanya made a point of ignoring Liu and gazed in the window of Mrs. Kazimierz’s house across the street, where a beautiful Tiffany lamp gleamed like a beacon in the shabby room.
    â€œWhy are you always following me?” I asked the boy, not that he understood a word of German.
    His smile showed a bunch of chipped teeth as he said, “No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda.”
    Ma I got, Pa I got, but whiskey and soda? Liu stumbled around like a drunk.
    â€œAh, schnapps.” And so we began a sort of pantomime ballet and managed to communicate a bit, at least I thought so. I motioned to my house and gestured. “Where do you live, sleep, eat?” And he jerked his grubby elbow toward a wide place in the gutter where he’d built a dwelling out of cardboard. It was smaller than Pookie’s doghouse in Vienna.
    â€œSee? Close-by,” he said. “Whistle, I come to you.” He warbled some toneless tune I didn’t recognize.
    â€œYou whistle for dogs, not people,” I said indignantly. I pointed to the jagged scar on his leg, raising my eyebrows in question.
    â€œBig fight,” he said cheerfully, and pulled a knife out of his short trousers. Tanya spun around, eyes wide, as he faked a crisscross with the point of the knife over his scar. She pulled on my blouse, rushing me down the street. When I looked back, Liu was grinning at us, with the knife tucked back into his belt.
    War news got to us slowly, and much of it was garbled. Holland and Belgium surrendered to Hitler, followed by Norway. The Germans entered Paris in June. And then Italy joined the war on Germany’s side. Yugoslavia and Greece fell in spring 1941. But it was all so far away that we hardly felt the effects.
    And we were all thankfully distracted by a wonderful parcel that came from America for Mother. The box weighed a good ten pounds, twenty maybe.
    â€œMolly O’Toole must have spent a fortune on this, Mother. Open it, quick!”
    She took the box over to her bed, loosening the brown paper carefully.
    â€œI’d tear that box open and toss the paper wrapping out the window already.”
    â€œWe can turn the paper over and use it,” Mother said quietly. She raised her glasses hanging beside the key on a string around her neck and opened the envelope taped inside the box. I inched over to catch the first glimpse of the contents.
    After an endless minute Mother handed me the note—the first time I’d